We (grand scale we) could do a winter mod like the old Bulge mod for CMBO. I hesitate to get carried away until eric gives a position on it. I doubt that WCS has invested the time and effort into this for an expansion, but one never knows.

I'm not quite sure how the licensing agreement for the Panzer Command assets is drawn exactly, so I can't say whether these graphics would be reusable in a Matrix product. (WCS spent six months doing gratis work on Panzer Command -- fixing bugs, refactoring code, and writing optimization -- so I'm somewhat familiar with the engine and assets for that game.) Free snow and ground textures are pretty easy to come by on the Internet, so I don't imagine that this should be any sort of bottleneck.

The filenames should all stay the same. I'll set up any graphics that have a winter version in a parallel directory structure under a "Winter/" directory -- e.g., "Data/Winter/MapTextures/DetailAtlas.png"

ORIGINAL: junk2drive The graphics that I used came out of the Mapmaker folders which came after Koios. I am pretty sure that they came from the internet and not drawn by an artist.

Do I need to do a .dds as well as a .png? If so, what output?

I think I ended up using only the PNG files to generate a texture with mip-maps and DX compression on the fly as the PNG files are loaded. If you've only modded the PNG files and got the snow to work, then that's what I did, and the DDS files are unused and unnecessary.

For snow, we should probably do new spec and normal maps too (snow has a lot of specularity), so maybe this is the sort of thing that ultimately we should try to do with a program like Filter Forge -- which can generate terrain textures and spit out spec and normal maps along with the diffuse maps. However, your screenshots look pretty darn good to me, so maybe we don't have to worry about the spec maps right now (I'm sure our artists would freak out if they heard me say "don't worry about the spec maps" )

Wow, that's very ambitious. However, I think you would need our original project files to edit the xnb files -- I wrote custom import libraries for most of the model types. I'm considering trying to write a snow-shader that would be able to add a snow texture on top of many of the scenery models without the need of laboriously updating all the texture files. If I can get this to work, it would save an awful lot of work.

That looks very nice. Unfortunately the hill texture files are XNB files, which is why you haven't been able to mod the green on the hills. (The hill shading was a huge pain to try to get right -- I probably spent as much time on the hill shaders as I did on all the other ground shaders combined.) If you wouldn't mind posting the snow texture you're using, I can try to make XNB files to replace the hill textures.

Snow battles will best be done with fresh made maps, rather than reusing the existing maps. There are enough dead/brown/tan grasses to take care of map making already in the game. Maybe we need a dead corn stalk. There may be enough marsh trees to take care of deciduous choices. Maybe a few bare bushes are needed. Of course snow covered pines and other map items.

Pondering if the decal system could be used to whitewash tanks and AFVs? There is a folder for user made decals in the My Documents folder.

_____________________________

Conflict of Heroes "Most games are like checkers or chess and some have dice and cards involved too. This game plays like checkers but you think like chess and the dice and cards can change everything in real time."

It's uncertain whether there will be new rules for snow and mud. The emphasis will be on implementing those features from SOS.

The decal system probably would not work to add snow to units because the decals only cover very particular rectangular regions on the vehicles. I would probably try to write an entirely new snow shader for this.